[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 153 (2007), Part 7]
[Senate]
[Pages 9874-9877]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                       AMERICA'S COMPETITIVENESS

  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from New Mexico. I 
say to him, it is always nice to serve with him in the Senate but 
especially this week because this week the Senate, as anyone can see, 
is debating perhaps the two greatest issues facing our country. One is 
a way forward in Iraq, about which we have profound disagreements; two 
is, how do we keep our jobs in a competitive world, how do we keep our 
brainpower advantage so we can continue this remarkable situation we 
find ourselves in where our country produces about 30 percent of all 
the money in the world, gross domestic product, for about 5 percent of 
the people?
  I believe the election last November was as much about the conduct of 
business in Washington, DC, as it was about the conduct of the war in 
Iraq. I think most people--and I have said this many times--most people 
want to see us acting like grownups dealing with big issues. They know 
that while we have our principles and we have our politics, there are 
some issues before us that are simply too big for one political party 
to solve. We have not reached the point on Iraq where we can do that. I 
am hopeful we can. We need a political settlement here as much as Iraq 
needs one there. But we have reached--or we are close to reaching--a 
political settlement on the other great issue we are debating this 
week; that is, competitiveness. This is a great big issue. This is of 
concern to Tennesseans in every county where I go. This is the feeling 
down deep in your gut or in your heart while sitting around the table 
at night: Am I going to have a job? As the Presiding Officer has spoken 
eloquently to this, we come at this from many different ways, but we 
see that our country now is in a very fortunate position that we can't 
take for granted.
  I was trying to think of an appropriate analogy today, and I was 
thinking of the University of Tennessee women's basketball team. I 
heard some nice compliments paid to the Wisconsin teams today. I think 
Pat Summitt and the University of Tennessee women's basketball team 
have won seven national championships, including the one this year.
  There was a time 20 years ago when the University of Tennessee 
women's basketball team coached by Pat Summitt played any team in the 
Southeastern Conference and it wasn't even close. Everybody knew the 
Lady Volunteers--the Lady Vols--were so good, so strong, so far ahead 
that they were going to win. Now they still win, but they really have 
to work to win because there are a lot of great teams in the 
Southeastern Conference. In fact, there are a lot of great teams around 
the country, and that is the way as we look in the world in which we 
live today.
  We cannot take for granted 1 year longer that our children and our 
grandchildren will enjoy this remarkable standard of living we have. 
There are a number of steps we need to take to deal with that.
  The step we are talking about this week with a reasonable degree of 
consensus is keeping our brainpower advantage. Why do we say brainpower 
advantage? Because that is one way we gained our wealth as a country. 
In fact, many of the studies show that at least half and maybe a good 
deal more of the growth in the wealth of families, the family incomes 
in America since World War II, has come from technological advances. 
That is going back a long ways. That is from Thomas Edison's 
inventions. That is from Henry Ford's inventions, Walter Chrysler's 
inventions, and more recently the Google invention. Wherever those 
inventions come, the jobs grow.
  I learned a long time ago that as important as it is for Governors, 
for example, to recruit jobs, it is more important to grow jobs. We 
were feeling pretty good down in Tennessee 25 years ago when Saturn 
came from General Motors and Nissan came to Tennessee. I added it all 
up, and that was 10,000 or 12,000 jobs. Then the suppliers came, and 
that was a lot more jobs.
  But in Tennessee, as in most places in America, we lose jobs every 
year. The numbers are a little elusive. But in a State such as 
Tennessee where 2.5 million people work, maybe we lose 10 percent of 
our jobs every year. They just disappear. Companies go out of business. 
But that must mean we must create about that many new jobs every year. 
So the strong economies, the economies that are growing--the United 
States being the prime example--are the economies which create the best 
environment for the growth of the largest number of good new jobs. That 
is what a progrowth policy is.
  We Republicans, we on this side of the aisle, are saying progrowth--
yes,

[[Page 9875]]

that means low taxes. I agree. I vote for low taxes. When I was 
Governor of Tennessee, we had low taxes. I believe we had the lowest 
taxes per capita in the country. That wasn't enough. We were the third 
poorest State, and we had low taxes. The problem was we had a lot of 
other rules and regulations and impediments and impairments that kept 
us from raising our family incomes. For example, we had a usury limit 
of 10 percent. We had very restrictive banking laws. On the good side, 
we had a right-to-work law. That helped us. There were a number of 
things that created a more competitive environment. On the negative 
side, we had a bad road system. Now we have one of the best four-lane 
highway systems in America.
  As we worked through the goal of how do we in our State of Tennessee 
go from being the third poorest State to what we became--the fastest 
growing State in family incomes--we went through all those other issues 
and finally centered on better schools, better colleges, better 
universities, more brainpower, because if you went to work at the 
Saturn plant, you had to know statistics, you had to know other forms 
of math, you had to speak English well and work as part of a team. 
There really weren't any blue-collar jobs left in the auto industry; 
they were high-tech jobs, and you had to be well trained to be there.
  As we have said to each other--and we all believe this, almost every 
one of us--our children have to know more than we did. Standards are 
higher and higher and higher because as some jobs leave our country, if 
we want to create more good new jobs, we are going to have to be smart 
enough to create them, smart enough to work at them, and smart enough 
to keep them. That is what the brainpower advantage is.
  We have had that advantage. We have had the greatest K-12 system in 
the world here for a long time. It has some problems now, but it has 
been a remarkable system for our country. There is no doubt we have the 
finest system of colleges and universities in the world. More than half 
a million students around the world come here.
  The former President of Brazil, Cardoso, was visiting with a group of 
Senators a couple of years ago, and someone asked him: What will you 
take back to Brazil, Mr. President? He taught at the Library of 
Congress and in other places in the world. He is an academic. He said: 
The American university.
  No one in the world has a system like the American universities. That 
is why we have people lining up in India and China and everywhere else 
to come to our schools.
  Then we have these remarkable National Laboratories, such as the Oak 
Ridge National Laboratory. Just in Knoxville, TN, the area where I grew 
up, with the Tennessee Valley Authority, the University of Tennessee 
research campus, and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, we have more 
than 3,000 Ph.D.s. What a concentration of brain power. Out of that 
comes entrepreneurial hotspots, new jobs, and this high standard of 
living we talk about in our State, as well as for our country.
  So what is the problem? You might even look at it, as the 
International Monetary Fund has said over the last several years, that 
we have been able to keep that high level of gross national product, 
but we all know anecdotally, and now from recommendations we have 
gotten from people who know what they are talking about, that we have a 
gathering storm. That is why simultaneously a number of us in the 
Senate, on both sides of the aisle, all began to come to about the same 
conclusion.
  Senator Lieberman and Senator Ensign, for example, took legislation 
from a group called the Council on Competitiveness, which said if we 
don't stay competitive, we are not going to keep our jobs. So what do 
we need to do? They told us. Senator Bingaman and I, with Senator 
Domenici's encouragement, and Representatives Boehlert and Gordon in 
the House of Representatives joined in, asked the National Academy of 
Sciences: We said, OK, you are supposed to know this. The Senator from 
Ohio and the Senator from Tennessee, we might have an idea, we might 
have a friend with a math program, but you are supposed to know. 
Exactly what do we need to do to keep our high standard of living, to 
keep our jobs from going to China and India? Tell us in priority order. 
They did that. They gave us this report, ``Rising Above the Gathering 
Storm.''
  They said if we want to keep our jobs, we better do these 20 things 
in priority order. These aren't the only 20 things. Each of us can 
think of more to do. We might not agree about some of those things. 
Some might be tort reform. Some might be to give poor kids vouchers to 
go to school. Those things aren't in here. Some overhaul of the tax 
system. There are a lot of barriers to innovation, but this group came 
up with 20 recommendations.
  What happened to that? We have worked together with the 
administration--homework sessions we called them--and we took the best 
advice we could. These 20 recommendations weren't willy-nilly. These 
were three Nobel laureates, a former president of MIT, business leaders 
like Craig Barrett of Intel, Bob Gates, the head of Texas A&M, now the 
Defense Secretary. They gave their summer. They reviewed hundreds of 
proposals. They said of all the proposals, here is one that seems 
effective; that makes a difference. Let's try it. This is what we need 
to do to keep our advantage.
  We usually don't have that kind of dispassionate, disinterested 
advice. I think that is why, after we got going, we were able to have a 
piece of legislation, Domenici-Bingaman, that had 70 cosponsors--35 on 
this side, 35 on that side. We had a Republican majority, and we worked 
together to produce that bill, and Senator Frist and Senator Reid 
introduced it last year as we were going out of session.
  What has happened this year? We have a Democratic majority, and 
Senator Reid and Senator McConnell have taken the same bill, after it 
has made its way through all these committees--and it is a big bill, 
208 pages. I reread it over the weekend. It is remarkably well 
organized, remarkably literate, remarkably easy to understand, and 
makes a lot of sense.
  Is it perfect? No. We have 100 Senators. We have 62 cosponsors of 
this legislation by the majority leader and the minority leader. Yet 
there are several things, if I were writing it, that I would take out.
  We have had a healthy debate today. We have had some good points made 
by Senator DeMint and Senator Sununu and Senator Gregg and some others 
who are critical of provisions of the bill. That is the way the Senate 
is supposed to work. We put it out there, we work hard to get our 
advice, we have debates, we have votes, and we go on to the next thing, 
which is what we are doing tomorrow.
  I would like to say, if all of us insisted on every right each of us 
has, we would never get anything done. So I am very grateful to my 
colleagues for the work they have done to help bring this to a 
conclusion, which we hope we can reach tomorrow.
  I would like to make just a couple of other comments in response to 
some of the criticisms of the legislation. I don't want to make too 
many because most of the comments have been favorable. I mean, it is 
very impressive when senior members, such as Senators Kennedy and Enzi 
from the HELP Committee, and Senators Inouye and Stevens from Commerce, 
and Senators Bingaman and Domenici from the Energy Committee bring this 
bill directly to the Senate floor and have a sense of urgency about its 
passage and step back and don't insist on all their prerogatives so we 
can actually come to a conclusion. They have produced a remarkably good 
bill.
  In improving it, however, one thing that was done to improve it 
yesterday was an amendment that was adopted which Senator Bingaman 
offered. That took out any direct spending in the bill. So there is no 
mandatory spending in this legislation. This is an authorization bill. 
It doesn't spend one single penny. That is important for everyone to 
know.
  There is also the question of its cost. Let me go to a Statement of 
Administration Policy that arrived last night. I used to work in the 
White House, in the Congressional Relations Office. I

[[Page 9876]]

think if I had been doing it, and if the Senate had been working on 
this for 2 years, with maybe a dozen Senators, including some 
Republicans, I think I might have driven over here and given this to 
somebody. I would have appreciated that, and I think many other 
Senators would have. Nevertheless, I put this in the Record this 
morning as a courtesy to the White House because the President has 
spoken out forcefully for the competitiveness agenda in his State of 
the Union message for the last 2 years, and he put a large amount of 
funding in his budget for the next 4 years in support of it, and a 
number of the President's proposals, most of them in fact, are 
incorporated in this legislation.
  So among the National Academy of Sciences, the Council on 
Competitiveness, and all the committees, we have the President of the 
United States, the most important voice in the country, saying this is 
what we need to do. I am grateful for that.
  I am also grateful for this Statement of Administration Policy which 
has made some helpful suggestions, and we have been considering them. 
This statement points out, for example, that the Senate bill in support 
of competitiveness objectives would cost $61 billion over the next 4 
years. Most of it comes from doubling funding for the hard sciences in 
the Office of Science in the Department of Energy, doing that over 10 
years, and authorizing--again, not spending, authorizing--doubling of 
the National Science Foundation over 5 years. Mr. President, $61 
billion is what the Senate bill would do. That is $9 billion more than 
the President's proposal.
  Let me point out that the President himself proposed $52 billion over 
the next 4 years. We have proposed $8 billion or $9 billion more--no 
direct spending, and fairly close to what the President had 
recommended. As Senator Bingaman said, the Budget Committee and the 
Senate, by a 97-to-1 vote, approved an amendment making about $1 
billion of room in our budget for the first year of these proposals.
  In terms of new programs, it has been said there may be $16 billion 
of new proposals over the next 4 years. Let me try to put that in 
perspective. I consider this progrowth legislation. Over on this side 
of the aisle, we get very excited about progrowth legislation. I do. I 
like it. I just talked about how I was a progrowth Governor. The first 
thing that comes to mind is taxes, the Bush 2001 tax cuts. I voted for 
them. I will vote for them again. They are progrowth. They cost $552 
billion over 5 years--$552 billion over 5 years. That is a lot of 
money. We do that over here and don't think twice about it because it 
is progrowth.
  This is $16 billion over 4 years. It is progrowth. To my way of 
thinking, it is just as progrowth as tax cuts. In fact, most of the 
research shows that our brain power advantage is the single most 
important reason that we grow the largest number of new jobs in our 
country. Our tax structure is important, but our brain power advantage 
is more important. So this is progrowth.
  Another way of thinking about it, if we are $8 billion more than the 
President's proposals, $8 billion is about what we spend in a month in 
Iraq. We spend about $2 billion a week in Iraq. I vote for that, too. 
But if we don't have growth, if we don't invest in education and 
research and keep our competitive advantage, we will never be able to 
pay for the urgent needs we have--in Medicare, Medicaid, to clean up 
after hurricanes, and to have a strong national defense. So this is 
progrowth legislation.
  As I look through the Statement of Administration Policy, I won't 
seek to discuss each of these items, but there are some differences of 
opinion between those in the administration and those of us who worked 
on the bill. In some cases, it boils down to the President liking his 
new programs and not liking our new programs, although most of his are 
in there. It is not quite fair for the White House to say it is wrong 
for the Senate to add a few new programs but not wrong for the 
President to add a few new programs. We are coequal branches of the 
Government.
  He has a new Math Now Program. We think it is a good program, and it 
is in here, but it is a new educational program. We have new 
educational programs, too, that were recommended by the Augustine 
commission, such as the You Teach Program from the University of Texas 
and the Penn Science Program from the University of Pennsylvania, both 
of which were judged to be the most outstanding programs in the country 
to help train existing teachers or train new teachers. And who told us 
that? This committee of 21, including three Nobel laureates who spent 
the summer reviewing all the ideas. That is pretty good advice we are 
getting, Mr. President. So I think we should take it.
  The administration doesn't like what we call ARPA-E. It is what has 
been called DARPA over in the Defense Department, which has been very 
successful as a research agency. Out of it came Stealth, which permits 
us to own the night in our military activities. Out of it came the 
Internet. There are some differences between using that to solve our 
energy problems, but we think we ought to try. That is just a 
difference of opinion.
  There are a few other differences of opinion. One is that some people 
think--although I haven't heard it said much on the floor today--we 
should not be using our National Laboratories to have math and science 
programs for teachers and students. I do not agree with that. My 
experience is totally the reverse. Our biggest problem with math and 
science is inspiring kids to learn math and science. What would inspire 
you more than to go to the Oak Ridge Laboratory, Los Alamos, being near 
a Nobel Prize winner if you are 14 or 15 years old or if you are a 
teacher? If you want to be a musician in Nashville, you would rather go 
on the road with Vince Gill or Martina McBride than sit in the business 
office of the Grand Ole Opry. So if we have these great National 
Laboratories, let's use them to inspire our students.
  That is new. That is true, it is new. But what is wrong with a new 
idea every now and then if it has promise and it looks as if will work 
and it is recommended by the National Academy of Sciences, the 
Institute of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine as 
something we ought to do? There are a variety of very good suggestions 
made by the administration's statement of policy. We are taking them 
all into account.
  We have had a number of amendments today. One of the concerns of the 
administration was that we not duplicate educational programs. That is 
our concern as well. In the work that we did, we asked the National 
Academies to look at existing programs and help us not duplicate those. 
So as an example, the National Academies suggested that we create a 
special program of scholarships to train new teachers. We looked at the 
National Science Foundation and, in fact, asked the Director. He 
already had a program like that called the Robert Noyce Scholarship 
Program. We judged that to be an effective program. Instead of creating 
a new one, we expanded the existing one. So we have been very sensitive 
to that.
  The legislation itself sets up a Cabinet council which will review 
existing math and science programs in kindergarten through the 12th 
grade to try to make sure we do not duplicate and that all of the money 
we spend is effective. The administration has its own academic 
competitiveness council. It has been at work for about 18 months, I 
think. It hasn't reached its conclusions yet. It is going to be a very 
useful council as well. And the President's own Math Now proposal, a 
new program, will also be helpful in helping us take the existing 
programs and focus them correctly.
  So the new Cabinet council within the administration, set up by this 
bill, the existing Academic Competitiveness Council already ongoing in 
the administration, and our own oversight, should help us continue this 
very valid inquiry to make sure the programs weren't duplicated.
  I told the visiting chief State school officers today, who were here 
from around the country, that there was a lot to take home from this 
bill, and there is. When the academies were

[[Page 9877]]

asked to put this in priority order, they didn't put a research and 
development tax credit as the No. 1 thing to keep our jobs. They didn't 
put bringing in students from overseas as the No. 1 thing, although we 
think it is terrifically important. They didn't even put more research 
in the universities as the No. 1 thing.
  They said improving kindergarten through the 12th grade. And they 
took a number of steps, some of which I have already mentioned: the 
summer institutes of the National Laboratories, the teacher institutes 
at the National Science Foundation--70,000 new teachers will be trained 
to teach advanced placement courses in math, science, and the critical 
foreign languages. Especially, this will mean low-income children who 
are just as smart but just haven't had the opportunity to have a 
teacher who knew how to teach it or the money to pay for the test, this 
will take care of that. This is from a Houston, TX, program that has 
been judged effective because it has worked for many years.
  Then I think a very exciting program is the idea of supporting these 
specialty math and science schools in each State, a residential math 
and science school such as the one in North Carolina, the one in 
Georgia. The Governor of Tennessee has just begun to have one. It forms 
a nucleus of excellence in a subject matter, in this case math and 
science, that attracts and inspires the best students and teachers.
  We found in our State over the last 20 years that summer academies, 
just 2 or 4 weeks, in different subjects, has made a remarkable 
difference in the quality of education. In Georgia, for example, their 
experience is that half the students who go to the Georgia math and 
science academy then go to Georgia Tech. That means they stay in 
Georgia instead of going somewhere else and then they are the source of 
the new jobs and higher standard of living for our future.
  As I hope you can tell, I am excited about what has happened today. I 
know enough about the Senate to know we are not through. The Senate is 
not done until it is done. My hope is that Senator Bingaman is right 
and we can finish tomorrow.
  I thank the majority leader and the Republican leader for creating an 
environment in which we can succeed. They have given us the time to do 
it and our colleagues have been diligent. I hope our colleagues will 
come to the floor tomorrow with their suggestions. But I want the 
American people to know what I said when I began. It is always a 
privilege to serve in the Senate, but especially it is a privilege this 
week because this is the Senate acting as grown-ups, not playing 
partisan, petty politics, not dealing with little kindergarten issues. 
We are dealing with the two foremost issues facing our country: How we 
go forward in Iraq--we have profound disagreements still--and how we 
keep our competitive advantage, our brain power advantage, so we can 
keep our jobs. We are coming to a consensus because of very hard work 
on both sides. I think the American people will be proud of the result, 
if we are able to succeed, which I very much hope we can.
  I thank the Chair and yield the floor.

                          ____________________